DIET&FITNESSPublished November20, 2015 By Milafel Hope Dacanay

Common Diet Plans May Be a Fallacy, Study Suggests

(Photo : John Pratt | Hulton Archive)

Scrap the diet plan for a while. Based on a new large study, there's no single diet that will work as people's responses to food can significantly vary.

The research conducted by an Israel team from Weizmann Institute of Sciece with Eran Elinav and Eran Segal as lead authors has somehow contradicted the common belief that low sugar diet will work for everyone. The study, which is already published in Cell, indicates that even if people eat the same meal like a low-glycemic diet, some may still not reduce their glucose and struggle with losing weight as metabolism can be very different for each person.

For the study, the team recruited more than 750 people who had to eat the same breakfast, which could be either glucose or bread, each day for a week. They also reported the other types of food they ate for the rest of the day using a mobile app, which can be tracked by the researchers. The team also conducted blood glucose tests, which could detect how much sugar remains in the bloodstream. Chronic high sugar levels can lead to metabolic problems like obesity and diabetes. Overall, they monitored at least 45,000 meals. They also conducted an analysis of their micribiome through stool samples. Gut bacteria has been recently linked to a person's predisposition to obesity and other metabolic disorders.

Based on the self-reported meals and blood test results, the team would then provide a more personalized nutrition recommendation, which should be followed by the participants.

When analyzed, they discovered that factors such as the person's body mass index (BMI) and age can have an impact on the level of glucose especially after eating meals. However, they also realized that food responses are varied, although a person's response over a particular type of food can be consistent. For instance, one woman in the study who had pre-diabetes learned that her glucose tends to go up every time she eats tomatoes. This means that her diet should avoid it.

The team hopes that with these data, doctors would begin considering precise diet recommendations than general ones.